Thursday, November 19, 2009

The Top Chef Bad Guy

There's a bad guy on Top Chef. I think his name is Michael. I confuse him with his brother, who's not a bad guy at all. The bad brother wears a backward baseball cap for all his interviews, he has a flat affect and a sneer. Worse than all that, there's nothing compelling about his badness. Last season Stefan was such a prick, but he was animated and in hopeless love with the fantastic and gay Jamie, and he cried. Even Hong the winner from a few seasons ago was full on competitive and arrogant, but he had a very compelling life story and wept about his family and their pride and how far he'd come. The greatest bad guy on Bravo's reality TV roster was, of course, Santino Rice from season 2 of Project Runway. He was funny, he was brilliant, he was full of himself, he was flawed, he was real. This guy on Top Chef has nothing - no sense of humor, no willingness to learn, no backstory, no nothing. He just thinks he's the bomb and even though we all know from high school those guys are insecure (so we were told) it doesn't make a guy like that any more pleasant. Truth be told, he's almost ruined the season for me. I don't like anything that reminds me too much of those guys high school.